Blog Archives

Look around any office today and you’re likely to see a wheeled laptop bag parked beside many of the desks. Why the wheels? Well, we’re all carrying more than just a laptop. There’s likely to be a tablet and a big-screened smartphone in there too – along, perhaps, with an external hard drive, a couple of USB keys and maybe even a sandwich.

The thing is, we’re carrying so many data devices with us nowadays that we can’t… well ‘carry’ them anymore.

That set us to wondering how much data is actually being toted around by commuters every day. And had us guessing how safe that data is too. So much is said about the amount of data on the “Information Superhighway” but so little has been said about data on the *actual* highway.

We took on the task of finding out and, for the first time, we’re lifting the lid on the true scale of the data drain caused by laptops, smartphones, USB drives and hard drives carried by modern commuters in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Berlin and Munich

The results are pretty shocking:

• The average commuter takes 470GB of company data home with them at the end of every day
• That’s 2,500 times the amount of data they’ll move across the internet in the same timeframe
• Every day, 1.4 exabytes of data moves through New York City alone – that’s more data than will cross the entire internet in a day
• As much as 33.5PB of data will travel over the Oakland Bay Bridge every day
• As much as 49 PB of data will travel through the Lincoln Tunnel each day
• Up to 328PB of data travels in the London Tube network every day
• Up to 69PB of data leaves Munich’s Hauptbahnhof on a daily basis
• The Paris Metro carries as much as 138PB of data every day
• With 41.33% of people having lost a device that stores data in the past 12 months, huge amounts of business data is put at risk every rush hour

The thing is, there isn’t a CIO we know who would risk sending massive volumes of data over the internet without protecting it first. But businesses in New York alone send more data home with employees than is transmitted across the internet globally every day – and the levels of protection applied to that data can be extremely light.

A thief holding up a New York subway car at rush-hour capacity could walk away with over 100TB of data. Though, of course, what’s more likely is that they’ll run off with a single commuter’s bag – but even that could have a big impact on the business they work for if it doesn’t have another copy of the data on their laptop.

It’s not just large volumes of data that we carry with us, it’s also the most-critical data; the edits to the contract that we’ve just worked through in today’s meeting, the presentation that we’re giving tomorrow morning, the tax forms that you’re halfway through filling in. Losing this data can have an immediate impact on a company’s success.

The data drain from our cities at the end of the working day could be a real issue for businesses – but it doesn’t have to be. Backing up data on mobile devices has never been easier – gone are the days of devices needing to be connected to a corporate network in order to protect them.

But many businesses still fail to prioritize endpoints in their data protection strategies because they’ve not realized the extent of the vulnerability issue that mobility has caused or the ease with which they can protect themselves.

To see more details on where the data drains from our cities, check out our heat maps.

There’s been a huge amount of discussion in the media over the last 48 hours about Facebook’s experiment on emotional contagion and whether it was appropriate for the social media company to carry it out. Here’s one such article from the Wall Street Journal.

What a lot of people are finding frightening, as Gismodo explains, is that they didn’t realize that they had actually agreed to take part when they signed up to the company’s EULA.

No idea what a EULA is? You’re not alone. A EULA is an end-user licensing agreement. It’s essentially the big blurb of terms and conditions that you have to tick the “I agree” box next to in order to be able to use the service.

Do you remember agreeing to taking part in Facebook experiments? No? Well, if you’re a Facebook user, the chances are that you have agreed to it. Statistically, there’s a strong possibility that you never read the EULA before you agreed to it. In a recent Mozy investigation,[1] less than 10 percent of people told us that they made a point of reading a EULA before signing up to an online service and more than 30 percent never read any of them.

If there’s one lesson to take away from this incident, it’s to carefully check the EULAs on the cloud services you’re using, both personally and at work. Can your provider view your data? Can they change the location of your data center? Who owns your data if you want to leave the service?

And it’s not just the core cloud services that your company uses that you should check over. Many companies have a huge “shadow IT” infrastructure set up by people who might not have access to legal support and are often unfamiliar with best practice in selecting IT partners. If your business lets individuals choose their own services to move large files, sync data to the cloud, outsource role-specific IT support—or anything else—make sure you have a policy for checking those EULAs. Because, if it’s not being done centrally, there’s a good chance that it’s not being done at all!

What makes a cloud service “enterprise ready”? Is it enterprise pricing models? An enterprise sales team? An enterprise mentality?

As more and more cloud service providers look to target enterprises with their offerings, the “enterprise-ready” question becomes increasingly important. The ‘third platform’ (adopting cloud-based apps instead of traditional server-based solutions) is gaining traction within big business, as expected. But how do they find out which solutions are truly built to meet their needs?

At Mozy, we take our enterprise credentials seriously. Sure, we offer a product that’s so simple to use that millions of individuals trust us with their data protection. But we also have more than one hundred thousand businesses and one thousand enterprises who choose Mozy to protect their data.

Why? Well, at Mozy, we believe that being enterprise ready is something that needs to permeate the whole of our business. It means building world-class data centers that run on enterprise-grade hardware. It means offering enterprise-level security at all stages of the backup process. It means offering enterprise-quality support with dedicated resources 24x7x365. It means enterprise control and administrative tools. It means being a part of EMC, a global leader in data protection and availability solutions. It means a hundred different things, not least of which is a commitment to excellence in compliance.

That’s why Mozy has long made SOC 1 SSAE 16 Type II examination and ISO 27001 certification a priority. Mozy is one of the only cloud data protection service providers to undertake these rigorous independent security assessments. This sort of compliance exercise is completely voluntary and not something to be entered into lightly – we see it as a badge of honor and an external validation of our commitment to you, our valued customer.

So, what does ‘enterprise-ready’ mean? It means thinking at every turn about what enterprises need and going the extra mile to provide it. Or, that’s what we think anyway. Tell us what you think in the comments below.

At Mozy, our customers come first. But if there’s something else we truly believe in, it’s the power of technology to transform businesses. So, when we have a chance to marry the two together and use technology to improve the customer experience – well, we jump at it!

In recent years, we’ve completely overhauled our online support experience with improved facilities for online chat, a huge knowledge base of articles, an enhanced online community and even resources for solving customer issues through social media.

You guys only see the front end of those solutions but there’s a lot going in the background to make all of those things work together. That way, as you access different support channels, we have a single view of you, and our agents always have the information they need at their finger tips to support you in the best possible way.

We hope you’ve noticed how easy it now is to access support from Mozy. Someone else that’s noticed is the judging team at the Stevie Awards. The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service are the world’s top recognition for sales, contact-center, and customer-service excellence.

Last week, the Stevie Awards judging team gave Mozy an award in the Best Use of Technology category at their Sales and Customer Service awards ceremony.

We’re so proud of our award and our support team overall. You can find out why by reading more about the team and what we offer here. And, if you ever need us, our award winning team is right here 24x7x365.

What questions should you ask before trusting your data to a cloud service? Not all cloud services are the same and by not asking key questions up front, you can leave your business exposed.

To highlight what can happen when you trust people with your data without checking them out first, Mozy carried out a hidden camera experiment asking a series of strangers in a coffee shop to look after a laptop. Find out what happened:

What should our man have asked before trusting anyone with his data?

How long will you look after it?
Just as some of our participants only protected the data for a limited period of time, not all providers are in it for the long term. Find out how long the provider has been around and how committed to the market it really is.

Will you look at my data?
Some participants in the experiment thought the data on our laptop might be of value to them. Some cloud providers will scrape your data to create anonomised information to sell on to advertisers. Encryption and privacy commitments are essential here – make sure your cloud provider has them.

Will you leave my data vulnerable?
Some of the people in our experiment did very little to keep the data safe, leaving it unattended as they left the coffee shop and went about their business. Some cloud providers don’t encrypt data and some take physical security more seriously than others. Make sure that your cloud provider is storing your data on enterprise-class equipment, in tier 4 data centers and in an encrypted state at all times.

Can anyone take my data?
In the film, we saw someone take the computer they were trusted with but we also had people who let a computer be taken from them. Data can be intercepted when using cloud services if the provider has failed to secure it. Ensure that your provider offers end-to-end encryption and transfers data over an SSL connection.